Why are we not promoting ‘homework’?

There is an excellent article in The Economist magazine this week about the rise of the freelance ‘bughunters’. These are folks who get paid to find bugs that hackers use to break into websites and secure networks. There are tens of thousands of people that work in this area from home. I know a guy in Fredericton that does it from his basement in the evenings.

This is a recurring theme on this blog. There are now millions of jobs that can easily be done from home – some requiring limited skills and other requiring very high skills but the common denominator is that they can be done from anywhere. New Brunswick seems to have high unemployment in certain areas around the province – why are we not doing a better job at promoting and exploiting freelance and home-based work as an economic development effort?

Enterprise Rent-A-Car was looking to hire 100 or more people in New Brunswick at nearly $15/hour, full time work to take calls from home. I haven’t heard recently but they were promoting in Moncton, Fredericton and northern NB but were struggling to find workers.

IMO, this is a golden opportunity. We need more people working in New Brunswick, paying taxes and contributing economically to our communities. That is the fundamental challenge for our economy and ultimately for the fiscal sustainability of our province moving forward.

If we don’t want people to move to the jobs, we should bring the jobs to the people. There are millions of jobs that could be done in New Brunswick from home and – as the NHS data shows – we are at the lower end of the spectrum for home-based work.